Benchmark Results: Crysis

Ah, the ultimate yardstick. At High quality settings, Crysis is actually fairly playable at 2560x1600. Above that, it looks like our Core i7 platform is holding back performance, since 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 are quite close.

Nvidia still has a problem at 2560x1600 with 4xAA enabled—we’ve seen this one over and over in a number of different games. Interestingly, the two GTX 275s aren't as hampered at that demanding setting as the 295, though none of the arrangements are playable anyway.

On the other hand, you could probably swing 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 and still see reasonable frame rates. At both resolutions, the GeForce GTX 295 serves up the slowest performance, albeit only slightly.

reasonablevoiceWhat the hell is up with the underclocked cards out performing the others in that H.A.W.X.Can the author of the article comment with what they think is going on there?

Happened in WiC w/o AA as well. Difficult to say went on there, but the results are repeatable. Probably more important, though, is that when more of an emphasis is put on the graphics subsystem, you see those stock-clocked boards take the lead, as we'd expect.

1.Very good article, unlike some other author's articles in this site, this article is solid (starting from the test system down to the conclusion) and interesting, this is what I always expect from Chris.2.As for the strange issue in L4D, HAWX and WIC where the slower 275s beat the faster ones....Odd indeed. Is there any chance the normally clocked cards automatically clocked down to 2D mode or somthing in-game? In other words the GPUs usage dropped due to the CPU bottleneck or whatever, and the cards' driver decided to clockdown to save energy! I've seen nvidia and ati cards do that. The monitoring utility of rivatuner could have revealed such things since it shows real-time clocks..BTW what software did you use to downclock?It would be funny to consider downclocking our cards to 'gain' performance!! 3.I hope the new (single PCB) 295 will drop in larger quantities, perhaps it will be more practical than the current one, and will tip the balnce here in its favor. http://www.techpowerup.com/img/09-05-12/13c.jpg

The most striking result here is the drop from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600. The same bug seen in Crysis manifests itself here as well.

This isn't a bug, nor is it fixable by a driver update. It's called not having enough VRAM to handle all those MASSIVE textures at quadruple their on-screen resolution. The same thing happens when I move from 1920x1200 to 2048x1536 on my 4870. The only solutions are smaller textures or more VRAM. This is why the "professional" cards (FireGL/FireSTREAM and Quadro/Tesla) will often have 2-4 times the framebuffer as the desktop counterparts.

DaerosThis isn't a bug, nor is it fixable by a driver update. It's called not having enough VRAM to handle all those MASSIVE textures at quadruple their on-screen resolution. The same thing happens when I move from 1920x1200 to 2048x1536 on my 4870. The only solutions are smaller textures or more VRAM. This is why the "professional" cards (FireGL/FireSTREAM and Quadro/Tesla) will often have 2-4 times the framebuffer as the desktop counterparts.

IF the problem is VRAM then why isn't the same result replicated in the GTX 275 benchmarks? Bear in mind SLI setups can only address half the available ram so in this case both cards have the same amount of VRAM.

Well, let's see: the 275 at stock clocks went from 31.3 to 7.4, the 275 at 295 speeds went from 28.2 to 8.1, and the 295 went from 28.7 to 7.9. So you tell me how it didn't happen in the 275 benchmarks.

ps- If you want validation of my remarks, just take a look at all the benchmarks comparing the 4870 512MB to the 4870 1GB. You can see the exact same thing there. Or, if you want to stick with the green, go back to when the 8800GT 256MB came out. At low resolutions it was fine; but crank up either the resolution or the AA/AF, and it chokes.